More on environment

The state's new electronics recycling law may not be that well known yet, but it's already paying plenty of dividends at the local level.

Anna Roppolo, the executive director of Rockland's Solid Waste Management Authority, said that last year the district took in 450,000 pounds of electronics and paid 16 cents a pound in disposal costs, a total of $72,000.

This year, it's going to cost 0 cents per pound, which means the savings are only going to compound.

"We're going to save over a hundred grand," said Roppolo, who used to be the district's finance director. "Everybody and their brother has electronics they want to get rid of. We don't see the number going down."

Across the river, Westchester's even more enthusiastic. Bigger county, bigger savings.

"It's been fantastic," Louis Vetrone, the county's deputy commissioner for solid waste, said of the month-old law. "Before it went into effect, we were paying $110,000 a month to recycle our e-waste responsibly. The bill for this April was $7,000, and it's going down."

Basically, the new state law got government out of the middle of a transaction between electronics seller and buyer, leaving the seller to shoulder more of the financial responsibility for its products.

It's called product stewardship in the trade and may end up cutting down on all that packaging they wrap around tiny headsets that you can only break through with an axe.

As of April 1, manufacturers have to provide their New York customers with a place to dump their old televisions, stereos and computers and in many cases are contracting with municipalities that have "e-cycling" capacity.

"We take anything with a plug," Vetrone said, "and have 26 pods set up at public-works departments across the county where residents can take their electronics during DPW hours. We're already getting inundated with requests from manufacturers."

Vetrone said companies like Sony and Panasonic like the one-stop shopping of Westchester, which can provide an easy disposal of the 15-year-old boulder-sized television by the curb without requiring the resident to carry it any further — like to Best Buy.

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Local municipalities drop the old machines at the disposal pods, or soon at the county's permanent location in Valhalla, and they're picked up by an outside contractor and broken into their trace metals and other salvageable parts.

"We check out the downstream vendors," Vetrone said. "We've seen some horror stories — walking into buildings where guys are banging hammers on the machines, no mask, no ventilation. You can smell the metal in the air."

Companies like WeRecycle!, an electronics recycling company with two facilities in Mount Vernon, say they're seeing increased activity.

"There has been a definite increase in interest from the public and from community organizations," company spokeswoman Lauren Dykes said. "We're seeing more people at our events and at our permanent facility."

The industry knows people don't want to do a lot of heavy lifting.

"We really try to make this easy," she said. "Drive up or walk up, hand it off and go."